All Tomorrow's Parties

“Pulls a little to the left,” Fontaine said, “single-action. You want to compensate in the sight picture.”

  “Thank you,” the man said and was gone, out the door, closing it behind him.

  Fontaine looked at Rydell, whose eyes were bright with what Fontaine suddenly saw were brimming tears.

  56. KOMBINAT PIECE

  “MR. Fontaine,” Rydell said, “you wouldn't have another gun around here, would you?”

  The three of them were sitting on the floor, in a row, their backs to the wall nearest Oakland, in the back room of Fontaine's little shop. Between Rydell and Fontaine, the duffel with the projector. The kid who'd been sleeping on the floor there was sitting up in Fontaine's narrow bunk, back against the opposite wall, clicking through something on a notebook; had one of those big-ass old military displays on, made him look like a robot or something, except you could see the bottom half of his face, see he kept his mouth open while he was doing it. The lights were all off, so you could see the steady pulse of pixel-glow leaking from the helmet, from whatever it was he kept pulling up.

  “I don't deal in firearms,” the black man said. “Vintage watches, knives by name makers, die-cast military…”

  Rydell thought he'd had enough to do with knives already. “I just don't like sitting here, waiting.”

  “Nobody does,” Chevette said beside him. She was pressing a wet cloth against her eye.

  Actually what bothered Rydell most about sitting was that he wasn't sure how easy it would be to get back up. His side, with the duct tape on it now, didn't hurt too badly, but he knew he'd stiffen up. He was about to ask Fontaine about the knives when Fontaine said: “Well…”

  “Well what?” Rydell asked.

  “Well,” Fontaine said, “it isn't actually part of my stock, you know?”

  “What isn't?”

  “I've got this lawyer, he's African Union, you know? Forced out by politics.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” Fontaine said, “but you know how it is, people come out of a situation like that, all that ethnic cleansing and shit…”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, they like to feel they got protection, something happens.”

  Rydell was definitely interested.

  “Trouble is,” Fontaine said, “they got this overkill mentality, over there. And my lawyer, Martial, he's like that. Actually he's trying not to be, understand? Got him a therapist and everything, trying to learn to walk around without a gun and not feel he's liable to get his ass blown away by tribal enemies, right? Like this is America, here, you know?”

  “I think you're still liable to get your ass blown away by tribal enemies, in America, Mr. Fontaine.”

  “That's true,” Fontaine said, shifting his buttocks, “but Martial's got that post-traumatic thing, right?”

  “You help him with these problems? You help him by holding a weapon for him, Mr. Fontaine? Something he wouldn't want to keep on his own premises?”

  Fontaine looked at Rydell. Pursed his lips. Nodded.

  “Where is it?”

  “It's in the wall, behind us.”

  Rydell looked at the wall between them. “This is plywood?”

  “Most of it,” Fontaine said, swinging around. “See here? This part's a patch, gypsum wall filler. We built a box in here, put it in, plastered it over, painted.”

  “Guess someone could find it with a metal detector,” Rydell said, remembering being trained how to search for stashes like this.

  “I don't think it has a lot of metal in it,” Fontaine said, “anyway not in the delivery system.”

  “Can we see it?”

  “Well,” said Fontaine, “once we get it out, I'm stuck with it.”

  “No,” Rydell said, “I am.”

  Fontaine produced a little bone-handled pocketknife. Opened it, started digging gingerly at the wall.

  “We could get a bigger knife,” Rydell suggested.

  “Hush,” Fontaine said. As Rydell watched, the point of the knife exposed a dark ring, the size you'd wear on your finger. Fontaine pried it up and out of the hardened plaster, but it seemed to be fastened to something. “You pull this, okay?”

  Rydell slid his middle finger through the ring, tugged it a little. Felt solid.

  “Go on,” Fontaine said. “Hard.”

  Plaster cracked, tore loose, as the fine steel wire attached to the ring pulled out around the patch, cutting through it like dry cheese. A rough, inch-thick rectangle coming away in Rydell's hand. Fontaine was pulling something out of the rectangular recess that had been exposed. Something wrapped in what looked like an old green shirt.

  Rydell watched as Fontaine gingerly unwrapped the green cloth, exposing a squat heavy object that looked like a cross between the square waxed-paper milk cartons of Rydell's childhood and an industrial power drill. It was a uniform, dusty olive-green in color, and if it was in fact a firearm, it was the clumsiest-looking firearm Rydell had yet seen. Fontaine held it with what would've been the top of the milk carton pointed up at an angle, toward the ceiling. There was an awkward-looking pistol grip at the opposite end, and a sort of grooved, broom-handle affair about six inches in front of that.

  “What is it?” Rydell asked.

  “Chain gun,” Fontaine said. “Disposable. Can't reload it. Caseless: this long square thing's the cartridges and the barrel in one. No moving parts to it: ignition's electrical. Two buttons here, where the trigger would be, you just point it, press 'em both the same time. It'll do that four times. Four charges.”

  “Why do they call it a chain gun?”

  “What this is, Martial says, it's more like a directional grenade, you understand? Or sort of like a portable fragmentation mine. Main thing he told me is you don't use it in any kind of confined space, and you only use it when there's nobody in front of you you don't mind seeing get really fucked up.”

  “So what's the chain part?”

  Fontaine reached over and tapped the fat square barrel lightly, once, with his forefinger. “In here. Thing's packed with four hundred two-foot lengths of super-fine steel chain, sharp as razor wire.”

  Rydell hefted the thing by its two grips, keeping his fingers away from those buttons. “And that—”

  “Makes hamburger,” Fontaine said.

  “I heard a shot,” Chevette said, lowering her wet cloth.

  “I didn't hear anything,” Rydell said.

  “I did,” Chevette said. “Just one.”

  “You wouldn't hear much, that little .22,” Fontaine said.

  “I don't think I can stand this,” Chevette said.

  Now Rydell thought he heard something. Just a pop. Short, sharp. But just the one. “You know,” he said, “I think I'm going to take a look.”

  Chevette leaned in close, her one eye purple-black and swollen almost completely shut, the other gray and fierce, scared and angry all at once. “It's not a television show, Rydell. You know that? You know the difference? It's not an episode of anything. It's your life. And mine. And his,” pointing to Fontaine, “and his,” pointing at the kid across the room. “So why don't you just sit there?”

  Rydell felt his ears start to burn, and knew that he was blushing. “I can't just sit here and wait—”

  “I know,” she said. “I could've told you that.”

  Rydell handed the chain gun back to Fontaine and got to his feet, stiff but not as bad as he'd expected. Fontaine passed him up the gun. “I need keys to unlock the front?”

  “No,” Fontaine said. “I didn't do the dead bolts.”

  Rydell stepped around the shallow section of partition that screened them from the window in the door and the display window.

  Someone in the shadows opposite cut loose with something automatic, something silenced so efficiently that there was only the machine-like burr of a slide working, and the stitching sounds of bullets. Both Fontaine's windows vanished instantly, and the glass front of the counter as well.

  Rydell found himself on the floor, unable
to recall getting there. The gun across the street stopped abruptly, having chewed its way through a full clip.

  He saw himself down in the basement range at the academy in Knoxville, ejecting a half-moon clip from the stock of a bull-pup assault rifle, pulling out another, and slapping it into place. How long it took. The number of movements, exactly, that it took.

  There was a high, thin, very regular sound in his ears, and he realized that it was Chevette, crying.

  And then he was up, shoving the milk-carton nose of Fontaine's lawyer's Kombinat gun over the bottom of the square hole in the door where the glass had been.

  One of the two buttons, he thought, must be a safety.

  And the other filled the air outside with flame, recoil close to breaking his wrist, but nobody, really nobody, was going to be reloading anything.

  Not over there.

  57. EYE

  AND when they are cleaning up, the next day, Fontaine will find a cardboard canister of coarse Mexican salt, holed, on the floor, in the back room.

  And he will pick it up, the weight wrong somehow, and pour the salt out into the palm of his hand, through the entrance hole in the side, until out falls the fully blossomed exotic hollow-point slug that had penetrated the plywood partition, then straight into this round box of salt, upon its shelf, spending its energy there as heat. But it will be cold then, like a fanged bronze kernel of popcorn, evidence of the ways in which its makers intended it to rend flesh.

  And he will place it on a shelf beside a lead soldier, another survivor of the war.

  But now he can only move as in a dream, and what comes to him most strongly in this silence, this tangible silence through which he feels he moves as if through glycerine, is the memory of his father, against his mother's ardent fear, taking him briefly out, into the yard behind a house in tidewater Virginia, to experience the eye of a hurricane.

  And in that eye, after the storm's initial rage, nothing moves. No bird sings. Each twig of each leafless tree defined in utter stillness, yet perhaps on the very edge of perception there can be some awareness of the encircling system. Something subsonic; felt, not heard. Which will return. That is certain.

  And it is like that now as he rises and moves, seeing the boy's hands frozen, trembling, above the notebook's keys, head still helmed with that old military set. And thinks for a moment the boy is injured, but he sees no blood. Frightened only.

  All guns exist to be fired, he knows, and Rydell has proven this by firing Martial's, that ugly thing, Russian, vicious booty out of the Kombinat states by way of Africa, out of wars of an abiding stupidity, ethnic struggles smoldering on for centuries, like airless fires down in the heart of a dry bog. A gun for those unable to be trained to shoot.

  Reek of its propellant charge in the back of his throat, harsh and chemical. A frosting of shattered glass beneath his shoes.

  Rydell stands at the door, the ungainly chain gun dangling from his hand like a duelist's pistol, and now Fontaine stands beside him, looking out into the bridge's narrow covered thoroughfare as into a tableau or diorama, and opposite, there, all glitters with red. Though surely in the shadows one would find more solid, substantial evidence, bone and gristle perhaps, and that automatic gun.

  “Chevette,” Rydell says, not to her but as if reminding himself of her, and turns, crunching back through the glass, to find her.

  Fontaine blinks at the queer red glitter over there, the smear that someone has so instantly become, and catches something moving, high up in the periphery of vision. Silver.

  Flinches, but it's a balloon, a cushiony oblate of inflated Mylar, with, it looks like, little caged articulated props and a camera. This draws even with the front of his shop, halts itself with reversing props, then neatly rotates, so that the lens looks down at him.

  Fontaine looks up at the thing, wondering if it has the wherewithal to hurt him, but it simply hangs there, staring, so he turns and surveys the damage to his shop. All this glass is the most evident breakage, bullet holes themselves being not so visible. Two of them, though, have punched through a round enamel Coke sign that previously would've rated an eighty percent, but now is scarcely “very good.”

  It is the counter that draws him, though he dreads what he will find: his watches there beneath shards of glass, like fish in a shattered aquarium. Plucking up a Gruen “Curvex” by its faux-alligator band, he finds it not to be ticking. He sighs. Clarisse has been after him for some time now, to buy a fire safe in which to place his more valuable stock at night. Had he done so, the watches would still be ticking. But this one is, the Doxa chrono with the gently corroded dial, a favorite of his which customers pass over repeatedly. He holds it to his ear, hearing the sound of a mechanism assembled years before his own birth.

  But here he sees something which will make Clarisse more unhappy still: her Another One babies lie tumbled in a heap, like some tabloid photo from a nameless atrocity, their ruptured heads and torsos oozing silicone (which is either a liquid that behaves like a solid or vice versa, Fontaine can never remember which). Not one of them has survived intact, and as he bends for a closer look he hears one repeating, endlessly, an apparent single syllable, though whether in Japanese or English he cannot tell. This briefly and deeply fascinates him, and he remembers a similar feeling, as a child, when he viewed through a police line the rubble of a movie theater in Harlem; the fire that had gutted the place had stopped short of the candy counter, but everything in that counter had melted, had poured out and solidified into a frozen stream of refined sugar, smelling much better, even over the sourness of damp ashes, than this silicone does.

  And hears Chevette and Rydell talking, arguing it seems, and he wishes they would stop.

  He is in the eye, and he wishes simply to know it.

  58. SMALL BLUE ABSENCE

  THE close-up, hand-held, shows Laney this small blue absence just in from the corner of the dead man's eye, like some radical experiment with mascara. A bullet hole, entry wound, of the most modest circumference.

  “You'll note the lack of powder burns,” says the one holding the camera. “Done from a distance.”

  “Why are you showing me this?” Harwood asks, once more the disembodied voice.

  The frame pulls back, revealing the dead man, blonde in a black leather jacket, reclining against some vertical surface fogged with whorls of aerosol enamel. He looks surprised and slightly cross-eyed. Pulls back farther, revealing a second body, this one in a black armored vest, facedown on worn pavement.

  “One shot each. We weren't expecting him to have a gun.”

  “The bridge isn't noted for adherence to firearms regulations, you know.”

  The man with the camera reverses it, his face appearing from an odd angle, shot from the level of his waist. “I just wanted to tell you ‘I told you so.’”

  “If he leaves the vicinity alive, your firm will find itself in more than contractual difficulties. You signed on to take care of anything, remember?”

  And you agreed to listen to our suggestions.

  “I listened.”

  “I came out here with a five-man team. Now two of them are dead, I've lost radio contact with the other three, and I've just heard what sounded like an explosion. This environment is inherently unstable: an armed anthill. These people have short fuses and no coordinating authority. We could have a riot on our hands, and once that happens, we'll have no hope at all of taking out your man, or of capturing Rydell.”

  “Recapturing Rydell, you should say.”

  “I have one last suggestion.” The man raises the camera slightly, so that his face fills the screen, his black scarf blanking the bottom third of the image.

  “Yes?”

  “Burn it.”

  “Burn what?”

  “The bridge. It's a tinderbox.”

  “But wouldn't that take time to arrange?”

  “It's already arranged.” The man shows the camera a small rectangle, a remote, that he holds in his other hand. “We've be
en planting radio-activated incendiaries. We like to cover the options.”

  “But aren't our two men likely to escape in the ensuing confusion? You tell me you're afraid of a riot, after all…”

  “Nobody's getting off this thing. It'll burn from both ends, from Bryant Street to Treasure Island.”

  “And how are you getting off yourself?”

  “That's been taken care of.”

  Harwood falls silent. “Well,” he says, at last, “I suppose you should.”

  The man thumbs a button on the remote.

  Laney flicks away from the lozenge, panicking, looking for Libia and Paco.

  The projector is still here, still on the bridge. He still doesn't know what part it plays, but Rei Toei must have a presence in the impending cusp.

  And he sees that Harwood knows that, or feels it, and is moving, has moved, to prevent it.

  He pulls the eyephones from his head and gropes through the colors of darkness, searching for a phone.

  59. THE BIRDS ARE ON FIRE

  CHEVETTE kept looking at the holes in the plywood partition between the front and the back of Fontaine's shop, noticing how the bullets had taken out long splinters of plywood on each side of the actual holes; extending lines, in her mind, through those holes and on back through the room.

  She couldn't figure how she'd missed catching one. What it had done, though, was give her the shakes; she kept shivering, and if she didn't keep her teeth together they'd actually chatter, and she had hiccups as well, and both these things embarrassed her, so she was taking it out on Rydell and feeling sorry for him at the same time, because he looked like he was in his own kind of shock.

  She was vaguely aware of people coming up to the door of the shop and looking in, but then they'd see Rydell with the chain gun and go away, fast. These were bridge people, and this was how they reacted to something like this. If they hadn't seen an armed man there, they'd have asked if everyone was okay and could they help, but otherwise it was about taking care, as Skinner had liked to put it, of your own side of the street.